CRM Testing : Best Practices and Checklist

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is an approach that is mainly used to manage a company’s interaction with its current and potential customers. It is beneficial to maintain business relationships, including customers’ data, information and interactions, and it should be tested thoroughly as well. As reports suggest, the CRM software market is predicted to grow to $29 billion by 2022 at a 1.9% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), taking a notable position of the global information technology. This signifies that CRM is very much in demand and companies, big or small; all are adopting it to have a strong hold in the industry.

CRM testing means to perform various testing approaches to ensure that the CRM software is operating correctly, to ensure that the data is being saved and retrieved accurately and the reports are correct and can be used with other software in a secured way. One needs to invest in the best testing CRM software testing company, in order to achieve the best results. The CRM implementation usually follows the cycle, as mentioned:

•  Consulting
•  Development
•  Integration Testing
•  Test Automation

The CRM testing process is a crucial one and needs to be carried out by experienced testing professionals only, as they know the tips and tricks to deal with critical issues that arise during various CRM testing scenarios.

CRM Testing

Top CRM software companies like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe provide powerful enterprise platforms, which can be adopted as it is or customized as per the company’s infrastructure and their business workflow. In case of platform customizations, CRM testing is required to be performed because of new coding and integrations requirements.  CRMs that are completely customized as per the business requirements hold a very small portion in the market, but they still need to have thorough testing, from backend to front end. CRM testing process ensures to get a perfectly functional, secured and appealing system to run a business platform smoothly.

Checklist for CRM Testing

1. Seamless communication

To have a clear and better understanding of user requirements, there should be seamless communication throughout the team. Considering the inputs received from the business administrators, developers and target users, functional testing is done to attain the quality output.

2. Out-of-the-box (OOTB) features

 The term “OOTB” describes various entities, processes, dashboards, views, etc., that are used for customization. Though major CRM developing companies have already performed OOTB testing, yet after CRM customization, the OOTB features expand and need to be tested again, thoroughly. Performing Integration testing and Smoke testing on the customized OOTB features is beneficial and helps in fixing major bugs. It also helps in visualizing faulty changes in the CRM data.

3.  Use different testing roles

CRM applications are commonly used in two business domains, marketing and sales, as they support user-based access and a variety of user rights. Also, depending on their roles and responsibilities, different people may have different user rights. It is critical to ensure role-based access and user rights to protect business-critical information being hacked or misused. Using apt CRM application testing services helps in ensuring the same.

4. Use of Non-functional testing

Non-functional testing efforts are essential for testing customizations. Both, on-premise and cloud-based CRMs have client-server architecture. It is essential to check how the client side is rendered in target mobile and web browsers, as the client side uses web browsers to run the CRM system. This makes it a must to have comprehensive browser and platform compatibility testing service.

5. Regression Testing

The Regression testing helps in signalling a problem, if any, in the application. This testing should be performed wisely and efficiently to attain best results. It is useful, not only in case of agile projects, but serves great for the Waterfall method as well.

Best Practices for CRM Testing

In order to provide best customer service for online shopping, majority of the businesses are investing in CRM. With vast experience and having global clientele, we have identified the best practices for CRM testing to have an effective CRM solution and get the maximum ROI.

• Choose or customize the CRM as per your needs
• Deploy well trained workforce
• Establish a set of rules for CRM usage
• Take advantage of Automation
• Easy and swift Collaboration
• Built-in Data Analytics
• Keep it simple, yet effective

Different Testing scenarios in CRM Testing

Before beginning with the actual testing, the team needs to sit and discuss upon the testing requirements, as documented in the specs. Also, the team should lay hypothesis about the behaviour of the end user and throughout the entire system journey. After working on all this, the CRM testing engineers can emerge with a qualitative and quantitative metrics to test against the benchmarked criteria. Based on the nature of the CRM system and the scope of the development, CRM testing can be done as follows:

• Usability Testing
• Functional and Performance Testing
• Data Quality and Integrity
• Integration Testing

Benefits of using CRM Testing Services

So, CRM testing services are essential to cover offline and online sales and marketing, operations, field work and customer support. The value of a CRM software can diminish if there is any obstruction in the data movement. Hence, testing plays a critical role in ensuring error-free data flow between the CRM and other systems, like, Mobile apps, websites,  Online Chats, Call centres, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, PoS (Point of Sale), Kiosks, etc.

CRM testing scenarios, if established correctly, help to feed the business intelligence and analytics and helps in reporting the modules with correct inputs. Inter-operability between a CRM and data-analyzing apps helps to guarantee smooth and healthy operations.

So, businesses, big or small should identify the best CRM software testing company to get the best ROI results. It also helps in better user adoption and caters more customers to your business. Also, CRM Testing adds value to data management practices for compliance purposes.